Thanksgiving Weekend

Breakfast at Mary Jane's Bakery.

Amanda Angel is who we work with on cabinet and tile design at the Heritage Design Center.

Imagine this in cherry (and 4 leaves!).

My reading chair!

Tons of fabric decisions to make - each room will have different fabric.

This is similar to how our sitting area will look.

Above you can see the type of deck "fencing" we will have, except ours is installed with more finesse. It is vinyl clad, and won't obstruct the view of the creek.

The girls cooked a terrific Turkey Day dinner here.

This is our rental cabin - it was so warm Marie and Susan played scrabble on the deck.

We spent a busy weekend with Marie over Thanksgiving. We started with a rental cabin up the North Fork, where we cooked a lovely, full meal deal, from scratch, Thanksgiving dinner. The cabin was very cute, comfy and reasonably priced, and well located as well for hiking. We also visited the builder at the site, and made some important decisions about the master bedroom (tray ceiling) and roof trusses over the kitchen and dining area, which will reduce some vertical support posts for a greater open feeling and give us an extra storage room upstairs.

The big event though was a trip to Hickory, where we spent six hours picking out Amish furniture. It is starling how many decisions needed making - not just fabric, but style, type of wood, and stain. This was Black Friday, btw, so it was cool to get some tremendous deals on what is a lifetime investment (really a generational investment).

We also spent time at Heritage Design Center making final decisions on cabinets (really the drawers in the kitchen - lots of specialty drawers have now been included). We also got some ideas for kitchen backsplash tile, as well as bathroom floor tile. Plenty of decisions left, which is why we'll be back for a week between Christmas and New Years.

We also had a great time listening to local mountain music and eating a great dinner at Mary Jane's Bakery (where we also had a great sourdough waffles for breakfast, as Doug discovered last summer).

Furnishings

Here are the tiles we're considering for the back splash in the kitchen. In the foreground is the granite we've chosen for counter tops and a wood sample showing the color of our cabinets.

This is the style of couch and love seat we've selected for the great room. We picked out a square coffee table similar to this one.

This is the base of the dining table we ordered. Ours will be made of cherry to match the built-in hutch we've ordered from Heritage Design Center.

The table opens to reveal storage for the 4 leaves. When fully extended, the table should be able to seat 12.

Here's the wood that our bedroom furniture will be made from. The dark fabric sample is the fabric of our swivel gliders.

The is the wood that will be used in one upstairs guestroom for the bed, tables and a swivel glider. The fabric will be used on the glider.

This is the wood that will be used on the hide-a-bed in my sewing room as well as on a chifferobe and other tables. The flowered fabric is my first choice and the geometric is my second choice since my first choice may have been discontinued.

Here's the wood and fabric that will be used in the great room. The flowered fabric will be used on the couch and love seat. The striped fabric will cover the two swivel gliders. Update: Oops! They're out of that fabric. I'll have to make some new selections.

Thanksgiving Weekend

From left to right, the front door, the window in Worth's office, the window in the laundry room.

From left to right, the window above the tub in the master bath, the window in my sewing room/den, the front door, the window in Worth's office.

The floor trusses have been installed on the deck and it's being used to store building materials.

Marie and Sadie found their way down to the creek. We'll need to work at making new paths once construction is finished.

There will be room to walk between the deck and the creek bank.

They've done a lot more grading since we were here a month ago. We were really pleased at how level the creek side is. There will be just a few steps at each end of the deck.

Still plenty of standing room in the "crawl space." We got to admire the support beams.

Randy met us at the building site and we made a few decisions about questions that had come up.

View from the Deck

Just so you all know, nothing has changed about the view of the creek. This is still the wonderful view upstream (taken from about where the breezeway was).

Additional pictures

These aren't really new - probably represent still things as they looked last week - but they show some other views of the fill (as well as the floor trusses, which we are told are going in this week, what with all the great weather).

The picture above shows about where the garage will be - notice all the new fill to the front of the house; the front porch comes off the "notch" you see in the top right of what you can view of the foundation here.

This view shows the fill in front of the house - in about the center you can see one of the four "sonotubes" that the front porch will be resting on. We're still not sure what the front yard will look like - hopefully not a valley or bath-tub! We believe they will fill straight out to the road. They've got to put the septic field in first (it goes in the front yard). Then they can add as much fill as we want to that. We are purchasing the fill directly from the mine you see along the Cane River near the turn off to the Bolens Creek road. It's actually a by-product of the gravel crusher, so we get it at a good price, not to mention the hauling is much cheaper. Kinda neat we are recycling local resources!

This shows how the fill extends now to the new creek bank. The deck is just a bit above the sonotubes you see here, so there is not a big drop off from the deck to the ground. The sonotubes and the foundation represent an engineered construction that is considered highly flood resistant. The house itself, including the floor trusses, is one foot above the 100 year flood level, and the foundations are literally attached to the earth, so the water can get high without washing out the foundations. Not cheap, but the right investment for the future.

Lots of Backfilling

Randy just sent us these photos from the job site. What a lot of progress since we were there a week ago. They were able to use fill from a nearby gravel pit to smooth out the inside of the crawl space and all of the area along the creek bank. They'll do more work in the front yard after the septic system is in.

These two pictures, taken from the other side of the creek, show how the creek bank has been rebuilt. It's going to be pretty flood-proof now. The track hoe operator, who has grandkids of his own, is going to build us a nice path down to the creek, downstream, near where the Cabin 1 porch was.

There is also some nice access to several large pools upstream in the woods. The excavation for the basement/crawlspace uprooted a lot of huge boulders, which have been placed in strategic locations to fill holes in the bank.

We think it is going to look pretty good, particularly after a few years. Plus everyone is welcome to help build paths, firepits, etc!!